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The bane of your newsfeed's endless scroll

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You probably reach here because it appeared on one of your newsfeeds.

Your mindspace is an assemblage of different information that you receive from the experiences you go through day to day. The endless scroll of the newsfeed across different social media platforms - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, 17, WeChat - what have you, is creating a new-age predicament to our ability to think. There is an assault of fragmented information upon us.

A sum of facts rather than a flow of information

Much of these fragmented information has already been simplified by the editor for the easy consumption of the reader. In this digital world where pageviews, clickthroughs and unique users are kings, strategies have been outlined to retain the attention span of users. Unfortunately, we have become more easily distracted than ever - with our attention span shortening from 12 seconds to 8 seconds just within fifteen years. The ideal sentence consists of 40 characters. That is, the length of this very sentence. However, such writing and reading material obviously dulls the mind and does not encourage any further thought processing on the reader's part. There is a continuous bombardment of facts, but very little memory or knowledge construction due to the lack of links made between these facts.